The VR port of one of last year’s best games, announced as a surprise release last week, is now available. In this engrossing exploration of mental health, you follow Senua on her journey to save her lover from death. Hellblade is dark and uncompromising but also an incredible display of high-end VR gaming that shouldn’t be missed.

A long-awaited VR nostalgia trip is finally here. In Pixel Ripped, you visit different scenes in the life of a young gamer playing through their favorite fictional gaming series. You play through various levels of these games on a virtual handheld console whilst also interacting with the real world. It’s an amazing idea and Pixel Ripped has plenty of charm.

Anamorphine, from Artifact 5
Price: $19.99 (Rift, Vive)

Another game focusing on mental health, Anamorphine follows a couple’s battle with depression after a tragic accident leaves one of them unable to play their beloved instrument. The game’s completely narrative-driven and has some interesting ideas, but poor VR optimization and some misjudged story-beats leave it feeling cold.

Moon Strike, from Big Dork Entertainment
Price: $19.99 (Rift, Vive)

A new take on the real-time strategy genre for VR. Moon Strike sees you commanding space-based battles with motion controllers and a fleet of ships at your finger-tips. Seize control of planets and blow up the enemy in fast-fire battles.

Lockheed Martin is using AR to build NASA’s Orion spacecraft on their mission to Mars. Lockheed Martin Corp’s engineers thoroughly understand the of power of AR technology and its potential as a revolutionary tool in the work environment as a digital infrastructure. So much so that the American based global technologies company is turning to

Grab your PSVR and get ready to travel back in time; Pixel Ripped makes its long-awaited debut on PSVR this week, and it’s joined by one other smaller title.

Pixel Ripped 1989, from Arvore Immersive Experiences
Price: $24.99

A long-awaited VR nostalgia trip is finally here. In Pixel Ripped, you visit different scenes in the life of a young gamer playing through their favorite fictional gaming series. You play through various levels of these games on a virtual handheld console whilst also interacting with the real world. It’s an amazing idea and Pixel Ripped has plenty of charm.

PieceFall, from Steel Minions
Price: £3.29 (EU Only)

A spin on the Tetris formula gets VR support. You have to make 3D blocks fit the surface they’re slowly falling towards. PieceFall is designed to be a soothing experience with ancient sites dedicated to tranquillity. PS Move support is also included.

Strategy games have a knack for just feeling really good in VR. Reaching out and grabbing units, directing them with your actual hands, and observing a battlefield from high above is a special kind of power. Until now, most of those wars had been waged on digital tabletop-sized zones, but now MoonStrike is taking things to outer space.

The 360-degree play space is reminiscent of Tactera, if only in design. Every map exists all around you during a match. You’ve got to physically get up, move around, and explore the levels to find all of the planets and send your ships into battle. It’s a clever and creative setup, but it lacks the depth and complexity needed to really make this one a worthy RTS addition.

One of the fundamental issues with MoonStrike is that there is just not enough to do. There’s only one single game mode to play in which you try and wipe out the two other opponents. After you pick a faction matchmaking starts. You can either wait for someone to join the match or just play against AI. That’s it.

Once the battle starts your units are collected at your main home planet. You reach out with your controller, select the planet, then use the analog stick or touch pad to assign how many ships you want to send out, and place your cursor over another planet. At the end of the day, that’s the entire gameplay loop. There is only one unit type, no upgrades, and zero in-game progression of any kind.

The catch with things in MoonStrike is that each planet will automatically generate new units over time. The bigger the planet, the faster it makes new units. Each faction has different bonuses and downsides too, such as yellow generating units the fastest, but also moving through the map the slowest. Purple units, on the other hand, are cloaked once they leave a planet so your enemies can’t see where you’re traveling.

Additionally, once you set a course for units, you can’t cancel it or reroute them. This is a little frustrating at times, but also forces you to plan ahead and predict your enemie’s movements. Since the maps are all in space in big 360-degree areas, the planets are constantly orbiting and moving around. Efficient movement is just as much about which planet you go to as it is when you set the path to minimize travel time.

Minimizing travel time is important because if two factions cross paths in space they’ll fight each other. It’s a basic numbers game though, similar to Risk or Civilization, in that the more units you have, the bigger advantage you have in the skirmish. The same goes for taking over planets.

If a planet has 20 units and you send 35 units at it, you’ll take it over with a few left over to occupy. Or if you send 10 units at a planet with 20 units, you’ll whittle it down but lose your units in the process.

Archery game QuiVr recently emerged from Early Access after more than two years of development. During that time, the game sold roughly 35,000 copies on Steam.

Sole programmer Jonathan Schenker and business partner Aaron Stanton say the game, selling at $20 per copy, generated around $700,000 in gross sales before Valve took a 30 percent cut for the Steam store. Stanton assisted with the design, business development and marketing of the game and the two split a $30,000 investment in the project to get original art made for QuiVr.

The game failed to achieve the same sales milestones as other indie VR games like H3VR and Beat Saber, each selling 100,000 copies at the same price as QuiVr. H3VR is an experimental shooting game which achieved that milestone between 2016 and 2018. Rhythm slashing title Beat Saber achieved the same milestone in just one month of 2018. There are also a lot of developers who have struggled with their first generation titles selling well below QuiVr. I hope to talk with more developers to tell those stories too. For now, I’m sharing what Schenker and Stanton explained over email about how they achieved a “reasonably profitable” approach with QuiVr.

‘A Hobby I Thought Was Cool’

According to Schenker, in May 2016 he was finishing up a computer science degree which he got “by convincing professors to let me use Unity to complete projects.” He also participated in hackathons and game jams during his free time. Schenker tried the HTC Vive at GDC and watched early development videos put together by H3VR developer Anton Hand. Schenker used to be into real-life archery and didn’t know Valve’s The Lab had its own archery game when he started prototyping another one in the Unity game engine.

“Before Aaron joined QuiVr was really just a hobby that I thought was cool,” Schenker wrote. “I had a full time job as a web developer and was happy just working on my archery game on the side with some feedback from the VR early adopters on Reddit and Steam.”

The first time Stanton played the game “you could download the demo, launch it, shoot one guy walking across the screen… and then you would have to quit the game, and restart it, because there was no respawn mechanic.”

“Without Aaron’s push toward tackling development with more of my time and effort, I’m sure that QuiVr would have spent much more time in Alpha before going into Early Access,” Schenker wrote. “I really just like making cool stuff and sharing it with others, Aaron’s involvement played a key role in convincing me that it was really worth pursuing as my primary focus.”

Stanton also suggested they get “help with outsourcing art.” That step was critical in turning QuiVr “from a generic fantasy game into a game with its own story to tell,” according to Schenker.

Stanton reached out to arcades as well by offering a licensed version of the game to deploy in locations around the world, adding more revenue to their effort. Stanton previously founded a startup

Last month’s charts showed Oculus Rift pull slightly ahead of the HTC Vive with 46.26% of the overall usage compared to the latter’s 44.56%. The difference this month is minimal; Rift comes in at 46.18% whereas Vive also drops to 44.35%. Microsoft’s Windows VR headsets were the only devices to enjoy a slight rise, moving the needle from 6.25% in June to 6.41% this month. Rift’s DK2 is still (!) hanging in there with 1.25% of the chart.

As always, we’ll remind you that this isn’t a definitive way of measuring the actual market share of PC VR as it’s an optional survey that requires participants to have their headsets plugged into their machines. Still, seeing as Oculus and HTC haven’t revealed any kind of official sales figures, it’s the best we’ve got at trying to gauge the market right now. Will we ever know how much these devices have really sold?

It’s not surprising to see such little activity in these charts given how quiet things have been on the VR front of late. We’ll be interested to see if this month’s release of Oculus Rift exclusive, Marvel: Powers United VR, and its headset bundle package will do anything to help out the Facebook-backed kit over the course of August, but other than that there’s not much to suggest there’ll be a big shift in numbers any time soon.